Norman Mailer- The Armies of the Night

Armies of the Night- History as a Novel/The Novel as History

Penguin

Norman Mailer

1968

"There is no greater importance in all the world like knowing you are right and that the wave of the world is wrong, yet the wave crashes upon you."

My book-buying approach is very scattershot; though I do have a system; the vast majority of them are randomly bought from usually the same bookshop (Oxfam Bookshop Hereford, I salute you)  and chosen through a combination of randomness and snobbery. When I find an author I really like, I hold off on running through their bibliography until I've completely finished the works of other authors (which almost never happens). I usually only use Amazon when there's something new (*cough* Murakami *cough*) that I really want or when I'm down to the nitty gritty of the last few pieces of a particular author and hoping they'll turn up second hand is a bit naive (though it does happen more often than you'd expect). The real big downside of picking books via author 99% of the time, particularly second-hand, is that I end up with a selection of books of which I know very little about. 

This is really a long-winded way of explaining how I came across Norman Mailer's The Armies of the Night, why I bought it, and how its subject matter and style caught me unprepared, yet somehow managed to fit a pretty interesting style of important 20th century world literature that I didn't even know I was interested in; the non-fiction novel. The first Norman Mailer novel I read was An American Dream, and it was right up my alley, as, like Bukowski and Hubert Selby Jr. for example, it took elements of classic hard-boiled pulp fiction and set them in a very cynical low-life modern almost-dystopian America. In contrast, the non-fiction novel, a genre of which Armies helps define, loses the advantages of true fiction but still presents the real world experiences of the author as an almost-unbelievable fantasy. The recognised originator of the genre as we know it was Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, and, like Capote, it's very easy to see the influence of Mailer's previous fiction directing the style of his prose.

Angry young Norman

Covering the 1967 anti-Vietnam War March upon the Pentagon, Mailer dramatises the events, his own personal experiences, by first writing as an omniscient narrator and making himself a separate but central character in part one of the book, entitled History as a Novel. Here Mailer details the planning and then procession of the march, using lavish, fiction-like prose to introduce his fellow conspirators, media observers, and opposing political figures. The intended effect seemed to me to intentionally portray the proceedings as somewhat fantastical, in the sense of its reliance on eccentric characters as much as pure luck and disorganisation. Mailer portrays himself as particularly ridiculous, self-important and comfortably at home as a ring leader of a circus of hippies and beatniks. To be honest, I found his personification to be rather annoying, as I did the narration, as I struggled to care enough about his sardonic over analysis of almost every mundane detail. As a result, I found large portions of the book a chore to get through.

This might just be my inability to find much (or any) interest in American politics; something that I'd previously found with another landmark non-fiction novel, Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72. Thompson's take on his experiences held a more directly cynical tone, but the overall effect of overall ridicule left the same impression- and, despite my familiar enjoyment of Thompson's acidic observations, I found that book to be boring as well. In the much-shorter part two of the book, subtitled The Novel as History, Mailer drops the act and switches to more direct, analytical prose taking a mostly-serious look at the experiences he fictionalised. I found this to be far more readable, immediately comparable in style and clarity to the work of George Orwell, particularly The Road to Wigan Pier.

In a sense it would be rigbt to admit that I was disappointed by this book, having enjoyed An American Dream so much, but my failed expectations shouldn't be made into criticism. In truth, despite somehow just hammering out a moderate-length review, I'm really not the person to be reviewing Armies of the Night because I think my mind actively rebels against notions of politics. Nevertheless, I'm not going to let this put me off any more Norman Mailer in the future, particularly in the hope that understanding the ideologies of the man more will probably give me a greater enlightenment of what Armies of the Night was really saying. Might not be the near-future, though.

L-Space- Can I Play the Piano Any More?

 

Just a quick, lazy post to draw attention to a great article on the BBC News website entitled The French Spy who wrote The Planet of the Apes, taking a fascinating look at the life and works of Planet of the Apes author Pierre Boulle. When I reviewed that sci-fi book almost one year ago now (where does the time go?) I was massively impressed by what I found to be a fantastic mix of sci-fi and classic Conan Doyle-esque adventure fiction. It was not a surprise, then, to find out through the BBC article that Boulle was a self-professed anglophile who loved all things literary and English. It was also fun to discover that his literary heroes were Joseph Conrad and W. Somerset Maugham, two men very highly regarded for their immaculate English prose, written of course in their second language.

I must get a hold of some more Boulle novels. In the meantime I have a review of Charles Bukowski's Factotum coming up sometime in the next forty to fifty years.

Hunter S. Thompson- Hell's Angels

Hell's Angels

Penguin Modern Classics

Hunter S. Thompson

1966

“The Angels don’t like to be called losers, but they have learned to live with it. “Yeah, I guess I am,” said one. “But you’re looking at one loser who’s going to make a hell of a scene on the way out.”

Another of the many books that I've been meaning to read for some time, Hell's Angels is the book that, upon publication, introduced the wider literary world to the talents and hell-raising attitude of the now-legendary Hunter S. Thompson. Now, almost fifty years after that book's publication, Hunter is obviously much more well-known for the iconic, genre-defining explosion of gonzo known as Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, the book with which ninety-nine percent of the author's fans discovered him (and through Terry Gilliam's cinema adaptation). I belong in that group, and Fear and Loathing made me realise immediately that I wouldn't be happy until I'd read Hunter's entire bibliography. From that bibliography, the entry which stood out most prominently as the book I felt most likely to further encapsulate the bizarrely magnificent style of Fear and Loathing is now the subject of my latest literary thoughts/ramblings.

Naturally it took me literally ten years to get around to reading Hell's Angels, in the meantime getting more of a fix from Hunter S. through collected editions of his many newspaper and magazine articles, such as The Great Shark Hunt and Generation of Swine. Those high-tempo drink and drug-fueled paperback collections gave me the fix I needed, but the itch remained. When it finally came time to read the lovely Penguin Modern Classics edition of Hell's Angels I ordered from Amazon, I was left with not a small amount of trepidation, powered by random comments I'd heard and read over the years suggesting that it wasn't actually particularly good, at least not by the author's standards.

For the first one hundred pages or so of Hell's Angels, I found myself in agreement with such negative criticism; Hell's Angels didn't seem particularly interesting. In hindsight, the reason for my slight dislike for and slow progress through the book was due to a seed of misapprehension planted in my mind so many years ago where I assumed that Hunter's inimitable style was something that had just jumped into the world, full formed, presumably with his first article. The idea of literature as a progressive chain absorbing its own influences, stewing in its own juices, replicating the adapt or die notions of evolution... these were concepts that didn't occur. The fact is that Hell's Angels, as the earliest Thompson book is naturally the book where his style was most primitive.

Spawned as a heavily extended magazine article for The Nation in 1965, Hell's Angels is a roughly chronological look at the world's most famous biker group through the early-to-mid sixties, where Thompson heavily analyses the group's public image across mainstream America in contrast with his own conclusions, made from essentially ingratiating himself in to their ranks.From the opening pages Thompson dives right in to the subject matter, with little to no thought in explaining the set-up. Details of the Angels he met and how he came to meet them are scattershot around the book, which helped delay the moments where I really began to understand the book. This is not gonzo journalism of the sort Thompson would excel in, but the early stages are very much there in places. After persevering through a multitude of quoted newspaper and magazine statements, used by Hunter to portray the media's supposed warped excessively negative opinion on the gang, I found the authors voice really came to life as he spent more time giving his (often painfully) honest opinions.

At the books conclusion, Thompson neither condemns nor condones the often brutal and always anti-social behaviour of many of the Angels, leaving the reader to contemplate their own opinion, all the while hinting that the issue was really a lot more complicated than that. I found the book to be very well balanced in length and tone, as well as very informative with the benefit of interesting subjects... but it still wasn't quite the Hunter S. Thompson I know. I don't wish to bash Hell's Angels at all (I gave it 4 stars on goodreads, rating fans) because it's one of the better pieces of extended journalism I've ever read (I even think I slightly prefer it to In Cold Blood) but the problem is that Thompson's later prose voice is so iconic and instantly recognisable that this earlier, tamer version lacks the spark I associate with the author. I'm aware that it's an unfair criticism to slate an author's earlier work for not holding the same quality as their work to come, but then I'm probably a pretty unfair reviewer. At any rate, I'm glad I finally got Hell's Angels off from my mental to-read pile, and even though it didn't quite live up to my former expectations as an adolescent, it was ultimately an interesting, satisfying read.

Toby Young- The Sound of No Hands Clapping

The Sound of No Hands Clapping

Toby Young

2006

Over a year ago back in February 2013 I read and reviewed long-standing English journalist Toby Young's first novel How To Lose Friends and Alienate People as an example of some lightweight non-fiction, offering a few laughs alongside copious amounts of gossip regarding the strange world Young encounters as he desperately tries to make his name writing in the US. Later adapted into a film starring Simon Pegg (which I just can't sum up the enthusiasm to watch), the book became an unexpected best-seller on both sides of the Atlantic, as it documented Young's employment as a contributing editor for Vanity Fair, and his inevitable falling out with absolutely everybody. It's a decent book, written by an author who's very comfortable using his particular languid, conversational prose style, and he does a good job establishing himself as a (mildly) lovable loser who always messes things up for himself. It does, however, lose a lot of steam the more it continues on.

It was really just a bit of obsessive-compulsiveness that led me to read the sequel. I found The Sound of No Hands Clapping in a second-hand bookshop, and it sat on the to-read pile for about a year before I very nearly decided to abandon my plan to read it, and give it back to the charity shop. My expectations weren't high, since the hook of the book didn't seem that interesting, and also because in my experience follow-up memoirs from media-types are usually quick cash-ins lacking the heart and the purpose of the originals. The basis of No Hands Clapping is Toby's immediate future following the release of his last book, and his decision to seek his fortune as a Hollywood screenwriter, following a couple of opportunities from both the adaptation of his first book, and a random from an offer from an unnamed Hollywood bigwig to write a bio-pic.

The handsome visage of Toby Young

On the surface this does seem to offer up the potential for some Hollywood insight, but ultimately (spoiler alert), what we get is two-hundred and fifty pages-plus of Toby completely failing to gain any sort of foothold in Tinseltown whatsoever. In hindsight it's almost completely baffling to me how badly planned this book must have been, something that's completely evident in the lack of structure, adventure or character development. I know this is a piece of non-fiction but it's appeal is completely based upon the success and entertainment of Young's first book, which was a much fuller, well-organised narrative that did have some of those things (though not in abundance); but then that book also had the advantage of covering a wider time period in a more interesting set-up. The Sound of No Hands Clapping has none of the advantages of a set-up as interesting as working for magazine publishing dynasty Condé Nast. Instead it's just Toby Young and his long-suffering wife living back in England, snatching at show-business tit-bits, embarrassing in a far crueler way than his hi-jinks of the past.

It's almost as if this book was a back-up plan for Young in the event that his screenwriting career might somehow not take-off, and that as a result he didn't have the foresight to apply himself to settings and situations that might make his book more interesting. The meetings with the mysterious Hollywood bigwig are genuinely interesting, as are other conversations with people in that game, but there's just not enough of it. Instead there's plenty of stuff about Toby Young and his wife, the vast majority of it cloaked in that godawful British tabloid sens of humour where acting like a misogynist is apparently okay if it's self-aware behaviour. Young goes into great detail about his family, which (really boring spoiler alert) grows by two babies during the course of everything else. That's nice and everything, but it's as boring as hell since by this point Toby Young is nowhere near endearing or established enough as a character for me to possibly care. It felt like I was reading some bizarre mixture of Tony Parsons (probably the most boring, pointless author I've ever read, author of Man and Boy amongst other crap) and Jeremy Clarkson, playing a good-old politically incorrect British rugby club bore. These segments killed the book stone dead for me, and as they became more and more prevalent further on, the less and less interested I became, to the point where I was racing through it just to put it down afterwards.

So yes, The Sound of No Hands Clapping is a worthless book; I gave it one star out of five on Goodreads. But at the same time it did have some potential; Young's style is assured and he seemed to have a gateway into a world that would give him some fantastic content, but instead he completely choked on his opportunities and ended up writing about his wife getting pregnant twice. Good for him, but not something that hasn't happened to a few other billion people on this planet.

Truman Capote- In Cold Blood

In Cold Blood

Penguin Modern Classics

 Truman Capote

1966

“I thought that Mr. Clutter was a very nice gentleman. I thought so right up to the moment that I cut his throat.”

When I finish reading a book I always enjoy browsing the Internet to do some amateurish research on it (never before I finish reading for fear of spoilers), usually beginning with the brevity of Wikipedia. Goodreads often follows that with some quick and often utterly infuriating reader reviews, finally followed by whatever random links Google search gives me, where the most interesting stuff usually comes from. I hope that doesn't make me seem unoriginal or lazy, it's just that I'm always curious as to the wider world's reaction to stuff that I've just formed my opinion on, which I suppose is asking for trouble. Anyway, Truman Capote's seminal genre-defining In Cold Blood led to one of those rare occasions where I  agree with a lot of contemporary opinions (as opposed to professional ones where reviewers aren't really allowed to be honest about disliking classics). On Goodreads I decided to rate it four out of five stars. I was momentarily torn on that since I can certainly see why the book is unanimously considered a modern classic but my own tastes knocked a star off... and I'm getting ahead of myself.

Like apparently every other amateur reviewer, my first introduction to Truman Capote was through Breakfast at Tiffany's, which I very much loved. It's an easy book to love; thanks to its novella length it doesn't outstay its welcome; its prose is gorgeous, its characters are mesmerising, a brief glimpse into a perfect fictional world. After reading that it was obvious that my next encounter should be with In Cold Blood, which, from what I knew of it, promised to be a much heavier and more harrowing experience. In truth I knew very little of it thanks to my prior unintentional avoidance of all things Capote, which included the Oscar-winning biography film from 2005. I'd never heard of the Clutter family murders, Dick Hickock or Perry Smith, didn't know of Capote's in-depth investigation of the crime, and, to be honest, didn't even know that this book was non-fiction until skimming the blurb while ordering it from Amazon.

As a result of all of this ignorance I was able to start reading the book with a clean mental palate, which, in hindsight, was mostly for the better. Time for a quick summary; In Cold Blood tells the true story of the build-up and aftermath of the night of November 15th 1959 in Holocomb, Kansas, where criminals Dick Hickock and Perry Smith murdered four members of the Clutter as part of a home invasion robbery that netted them less than $100. Capote began his journalistic investigation of the crime almost immediately afterwards but took six years to finish the book, basing it on meticulous lengthy interviews with the people involved in the case, including the killers themselves. The gravitas of the reality of the situation permeates every line in the book, but, as everyone apart from me already knew all along, Capote isn't simply a normal, plain true crime writer, he's a literary giant; and so In Cold Blood is composed with the care and attention to narrative of a classic fiction. Perhaps more care and attention, necessary in order to manipulate the awkwardness of reality into more palatable, engrossing reading.

At this point the argument emerges of whether such stylish arrangements combined with allegedly manufactured conversations between characters automatically damages the quality or integrity of the book at its core, but to really answer that subjective question you have to decide for yourself what the key purpose of the book is. Now personally I don't really care too much about the absolute one hundred percent accuracy of the story, at least in terms of Capote's presentation (and probable dramatisation) of conversations and his interpretation of the thoughts and feelings of the characters, but I do care about the core message of a book resonating with me through the characterisations and the overall style, which is where I lose lit. crit. points somewhat by admitting that Capote's work here didn't do it for me at the level of my favourite classics.

Dick Hickock & Perry Smith

The key to the book, in my opinion, is the in-depth characterisation of the Dick and Perry beyond just the Clutter murders, though I've read many people focus almost exclusively on the disturbing nature of the crime. Author Tom Wolfe famously coined the term Pornoviolence (in his critical essay of that name) specifically in relation to In Cold Blood and the percieved enticing anti-glamour of the crime existing as the attraction of the book, but I vehemently disagree; Capote doesn't spend a huge amount of time on the night in question alone to the extent that the violent details are tame by modern standards, particularly in the true crime genre. The key to the novel is Capote's deep but not overt analysis of the killers' characters, and he far from glamourises them as people; this isn't American Psycho or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, it's an often disconcerting look at what might make a complex person capable of committing a psychotic crime. On a personal level I didn't really start enjoying the book much until after Dick and Perry's arrest (spoiler alert), specifically the depiction of the trial and then their times in prison on death row, mostly because of the introspection they offer now they have the time to consider their actions.

The undoubted consensus is that In True Blood is an American modern classic, vital reading for any serious literature fan, but, there does seem to be a similar consensus that it's not a huge amount of fun to read throughout, unlike, say, key work by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Norman Mailor or Capote's more stylish other smash hit, Breakfast at Tiffany's. The narration is often very dry, which works extremely well in contrast to some of the quotes, but clashes with the clear stylistic arrangements used to drive the narrative of the story. The style also seemed, to me, to demand that the reader take the seriousness of the crime at face value; which is again fine (though limiting) when taking the novel as pure crime fiction, but suffers through its simplicity when pushed into the more uncertain boundaries of pseudo-fiction (I found it impossible to be shocked by anything in the book, especially compared to a contemporary novel like Naked Lunch, for example, released seven years earlier). Finally along those lines, it was hard for me to get fully invested in a non-fiction character study of the two killers when I didn't feel like I could completely trust their stories, particularly anecdotes from childhood that seemed relevant.

But these are criticisms for criticisms' sake, because this is my blog. Though it wasn't the instant favourite I naively had hoped it might be, In Cold Blood struck me hard with a compelling real story put together by an incredibly talented writer. In just the few days since I finished it I've found myself thinking about aspects of it more and more, to the extent where I know this isn't going to be a book that quickly fades from memory. It's an often chilling and almost always fascinating modern classic, and though the style wasn't to my exact taste I can only compel every fan of such literature to find a copy and come to their own conclusions regarding the effects on them of such an experimental idea.

L-Space- Louis Theroux in LA

After posting some brief thoughts on Orwell and I yesterday, I wasn't intending on writing another post quite so soon, but almost immediately ran into another interesting, albeit far more modern, article that took my attention thanks to its author. Louis Theroux has long been a cult favourite of mine and many others; son of iconic travel writer Paul Theroux (and brother to screenwriter Justin), Louis made his name with the BBC in the mid-90's through a series of investigative documentaries entitled Louis Theroux's Weird Weekends. In each show the mild-mannered, amiable and very likable Louis threw himself into a particular sub-culture, usually in the US, and tried to understand what made the strange people he met click. As his popularity grew he began to make increasingly serious shows about more dangerous social issues from across the world; including introducing much of the non-US world to the cult of the Phelps family at the Westborough Baptist Church, in Louis' most famous work. In 2005 he released as yet his only book The Call of the Weird: Travels in American Subcultures, which I own but unfortunately didn't enjoy as much as his TV work.

Louis Theroux & Friend

The article that I read was written by Louis (I have to always call him by his first name because he's so nice, so nice that my Grandmother named her dog after him) and published on the BBC News website as a preview of his upcoming three-part series of documentaries (the first is airing tomorrow night on BBC2 in Britain). It's entitled Louis Theroux: Moving to Los Angeles and exists as a personal take on the making of these shows (themselves named Louis Theroux's LA Stories), where he writes about the effect of temporarily moving his immediate family to Los Angeles at the time. He refrains from detailing too much of the shows' contents and instead talks about the concepts behind them, all the while assembling his own overall impressions of life in such an apparently strange city, which is really what made the article stand out for me.

One of the main appeals to Theroux's persona is his completely convincing presentation of himself as a such a likable English chap in the face of such oddities as porn stars or pro-wrestlers or genuinely disturbing extremists; and it's also his greatest strength in terms of encouraging his interviewees to open up to him. When you consider his life and career as a whole Louis is probably stretching the truth somewhat with his disbelief at the strangeness of LA (in comparison to his time in Johannesburg, for example), but as a fellow Englander it was easy to understand his point of view. I've never visited LA and I probably never will, but it's existence as the global capital of entertainment production has ensured that I've encountered more fictional versions of it than I can remember (off the top of my head, video game LA Noire and superior Buffy spin-off Angel seem most prominent to me).

Serious Face.

Most of this fiction is likely heavily fake, but the concept of so many different versions of this place, twisted this way and that based on the whims of writers and directors, resonates heavily with the unbelievable aspect of the real city. The philosophy of life imitating art is something I strongly believe in throughout everyday life and human behavior, and so the idea of a city that is largely based around fictional versions of itself is fascinating. It's also a little scary, when briefly thinking about how out of control the human race is in regards to its consumption of various forms of entertainment (especially now that 'reality' TV is clearly anything but and just accentuates the issue). Authors like Paul Auster, who I'm currently beguiled by more than ever thanks to Oracle Night, seem to recognise the surreal nature of our reality and presents fiction that challenges our perceptions of it, which is brilliant in a way but also digs further into the massive, unending black hole of transubstantial reality, where, as the classic scientific idiom goes, it becomes impossible to analyse something without effecting it.

I'm going to wrap this up now because I didn't really intend to start rambling on for so long and I've got no intention of trying to write some sort of lengthy essay on such a hard-to-define subject. Also I'm getting away from the original point of the post, which was to link to a very enjoyable and well-written article by a respected journalist. I'm very much looking forward to the three upcoming documentaries, and they''ll almost certainly turn up in the next installment of Not Books, which I've been occasionally working on and discovering that, for someone who writes a book blog, I watch entirely too much television.

L-Space- Confessions of an English Literature Reviewer

I have the day off work, so a lazy morning of watching awful morning television shows while lounging about on the sofa eventually turned into a short trawl through Wikipedia links. Wikipedia is my go-to place in times of boredom, and I've set the random article function as my homepage (which more often than not results in a short article about a village in Eastern Europe for some reason). Through reading an article on litotes (and trying to work out how to pronounce it) I was quickly led to an article about George Orwell's Politics and the English Language (1946) (here, originally published in Horizon magazine), an essay I'd never read before. I found the full essay (here, possibly even legally) and it's fairly short and succinct; a well-written rant against the way that a few factors had been leading to the decline of the English Language.

Orwell's main cause of discontent was the manipulation of the language's various faculties in political writings in order to disguise the nature and/or hypocrisy of its actual meaning, and of the writer or political party behind it. As a natural-born cynic regarding the topic I can't really say much about the political aspect, only that almost seventy years later such techniques are undoubtedly ubiquitous in particular segments of modern society, the most obvious of which is advertising (and we all know advertising rules the world). Orwell wrote the comedy novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying on the subject of advertising, which one day might get re-read and reviewed here.

 

My most necessary rule.

Orwell goes further in his essay by addressing the application of political dialogue in literary criticism, which is, to be honest, what made me thoughtful enough to write this short post. His point is that a lot of literary criticism relies upon the reviewer creating a kind of false sense of immaculate articulation through tossing in to their reviews as many longer words as possible, regardless of their actual effect or even meaning. It's not difficult to recognise Orwell's point (and some of the examples quoted in the essay are ridiculous), and now I'm constantly set to worry that I regularly do the same thing in my reviews; sacrificing accurate reviewing for the sake of flowery prose, thus making the whole exercise a waste of time. Muddying the waters, so to speak.

I think everyone who's ever written a few articles on absolutely anything must be guilty of this to a small extent at least, and it's not something that a writer should overly worry about if it doesn't occur to them that it's something that they're prominently doing already. Personally I am worried, so this short post is an attempt to follow Orwell's rules while talking about them (very meta, I think). I started this blog to hone my non-fiction writing skills precisely thanks to the quality of prose displayed by my favourite authors like Orwell, and almost two years on I think the project is progressing decently, but not perfectly. Ah well, onwards and upwards and all that. At present I'm currently reading Truman Capote's In Cold Blood (albeit slowly) so that will be on the review schedule, as will the next Discworld book and possibly, possibly the continuation of the Comics Snobbery series. But maybe not.

Jon Ronson- The Men Who Stare At Goats

The Men Who Stare At Goats

Picador

Jon Ronson

2004

“Most goat-related military activity is still highly classified.”

I'm back, feeling strangely guilty about the fact I haven't published anything on my blog that nobody reads in about ten days, which is odd when I remember I used to go months and months without writing anything. Maybe one of the key goals of this blog in the first place, trying to increase my awful writing productivity, is finally getting there. Unfortunately this probably isn't going to be a very long one, simply because there isn't much I found interesting about The Men Who Stare At Goats. I'm not going to completely attack it, but it's barely any more than a two star book thanks to fundamental problems with the set up. Hey look, one paragraph down.

I picked this book up off the shelf at the Oxfam charity book shop (my favourite bookstore in the world) based on my desire to put a bit more non-fiction in my life, and also because I'd seen the loosely-adapted film version (starring George Clooney, Kevin Spacey, Jeff Bridges and Ewan McGregor, which is pretty impressive) a few years ago. Although I didn't particularly enjoy it, the premise lodged itself in my brain rather solidly. Respected journalist and non-fiction writer Jon Ronson is one of many to use the period following 9/11 as book material, but rather than settling on the typically serious tone of 'Bush is bad, mmkay', looks at the far more esoterical, quirky, and alternative-reader friendly subject of paranormal abilities, and their application within the US military. Let me quickly say now that this book is probably a conspiracy theorist's dream.

Ronson approaches the task through numerous, numerous interviews with a wide variety of people (many of whom seemed interchangeable to me), presented presumably in a chronological fashion. These interviews form the basis for essentially everything Ronson uncovers and concludes from his studies, and offer him further research ammunition to continue with. The majority of everything he discusses originates from the mind of a man named Jim Channon, who, in the 1960's, attempted to convince his military superiors to adopt and experiment with strange New Age concepts, with the ultimate fantastical goal of doing amazing things like walking through walls or, as in the title, killing goats by looking at them. Ronson follows the progression of his ideas, their apparent final rejection, and then their theorised (by Ronson) rebirth in the midst of the second gulf war.

A goat, yesterday.

All of this as a premise sounds like a great idea for a book, but in reality there are a couple of glaring flaws that heavily damaged my enjoyment of it. Ronson is a good writer, writing in that recognisable, newspaper journalist style that I encountered in War Reporting for Cowards, for example. He presents himself as a likable, incongruous reporter conversing with some equally likable but most likely insane subjects, but does so in such a fashion as to resemble a work of fiction. His characters and conversations are so unrealistically charismatic and quirky that it's difficult to fully invest in what they're saying. This, mind you, wouldn't be so much of a problem by itself if it weren't for the second major flaw in the book; it's virtually all second hand storytelling. Every crazy story, every over the top character and every cynical presentation of the authorities is entirely derived from (admittedly extended) conversations with crazy people. 

I think Ronson himself recognises this, which is why he chose the more dramatic, cinematic conversation style, and also why he tries very, very hard to make his own connection between events and ideas. This is fair enough, and logically done, but again a lack of definitive proof or even realistic evidence means that it all essentially means nothing. Earlier on in the book I found his collection of stories and personalities interesting and appealing, full of charisma and promises of further revelations, but as the book went on I became more and more disillusioned by the lack of real progress. Three quarters of the way through I actually wanted to give up, but my commitment to this bottom-rung blog of randomness pulled me through. Plus, Jon Ronson is a legitimately talented writer who had a good idea for a book, but I can only imagine that researching this topic was a fool's errand. Even if you do assume that the things he talks about are true, it was obviously going to be practically impossible for him to gather secret evidence presumably kept secret by one of the most powerful organisations in the world. I wouldn't rule out reading something else by Ronson, but I'm not in any rush.

AA Gill- The Angry Island: Hunting the English

The Angry Island: Hunting the English

Simon & Schuster

AA Gill

2007

 My recent indulgence in more non-fiction than what I did used to read led me to this random little number, a book I wouldn't call 'good' as an overall description, but had enough about it for me to at least be glad that I read it. To a certain extent, anyway. If I fall off a cliff and get amnesia I probably won't read it again. Anyway, this review should be a pretty short one; not because I'm lazy (far from it), but because hopefully it'll be reflective of AA Gill's The Angry Island in being highly stylised in its use of yea olde English language without actually saying much of relevance.

Anyway, I picked this book from the charity bookshop shelf simply because of its topic, rather than having any inclination towards AA Gill's writing. Though I knew the name, I didn't really know who he was (previously confusing him with Will Self), but a quick bit of background looking-up and a quick bit of reading revealed the truth; he's basically Jeremy Clarkson with an upmarket image, and a vastly superior command of the English language. He's also full of shit at least 90% of the time, but it's rather entertaining all the same. As the title suggests, this is book is about English people. As an English person, I was intrigued. AA Gill is also mostly English in nationality (and completely so in appearance), but he pretends not to be, seemingly for the sake of annoying his readers (this is a common theme).

Gill's method of analysing the nation consists of addressing the key features and stereotypes of English culture, adding a bit of historical and anthropological perspective, then mercilessly poking fun at them through his incredibly dry and well-constructed prose. This is, in some places, very good stuff indeed. The historical stuff is enlightening (well, for me) and amusing in places, though Gill rarely goes into much detail. It's a short book, and its brevity is both a gift and a curse, as his genuinely interesting historical knowledge is dealt short shrift for the sake of keeping his witticisms from overstaying their welcome.

There's really not much else to say about this book than that. In a certain way I absolutely respect it for what it is; a character piece. I have no idea what AA Gill is really like, but here his narrative is directly linked to an exaggerated character designed to provoke both controversy and loyalty in equal measures. It became clear early on to me that this was the case, which changed the nature of my reading it substantially; in its attempts to achieve its goals as an aggravating, charismatic extended magazine piece it works almost perfectly, but that's essentially all it is. As a highlight of its author's talent with words it is very good, like a modern day Thomas de Quincy (whose Confessions of an English Opium Eater is of course the title I stole/homaged for this blog), but there's only so far that can actually take you. When comparing this book with the last piece of non-fiction I read, Richard Dawkin's The Blind Watchmaker, it becomes clear just how little actual substance there is in this book; while Dawkin's friendly, amiable tone works very well in presenting heavyweight, astounding real-world facts, Gill has to struggle to be as loud as possible in an effort to disguise the fact that he barely says anything.

Nevertheless, I did enjoy reading this book, almost entirely to indulge and hopefully learn from Gill's mastery of language (particularly in establishing a narrative tone), but I can guarantee I'll never read it again. I'd recommend it to other people looking for a short, amusing lightweight read (and even then only British people, since it's not going to tell a non-Brit anything valuable), but only if you take the gentle prodding with a pinch of salt and don't expect too much.

Chris Ayres- War Reporting for Cowards

War Reporting for Cowards

Chris Ayres

2003

“The movies, I thought, have got the soundtrack to war all wrong. War isn't rock 'n' roll. It's got nothing to do with Jimi Hendrix or Richard Wagner. War is nursery rhymes and early Madonna tracks. War is the music from your childhood. Because war, when it's not making you kill or be killed, turns you into an infant. For the past eight days, I'd been living like a five-year-old — a nonexistence of daytime naps, mushy food, and lavatory breaks. My adult life was back in Los Angeles with my dirty dishes and credit card bills.” 

Blogging is hard.

Well, it's not, it's actually kind of easy, in that you've got the complete freedom to write whatever you want, whenever you want, and spurt out as many opinions as you can muster. Somehow, though, the motivation to sit down for an hour, if that, and type out a hastily-written summary of a random book I've just read is really, really hard. Recently I've found it harder because I've stepped up my pace in book reading, amassing a pile of 'to review' books at a greater pace than I could possibly write. Still, the only way to soldier on, I find is to force myself to hammer at the keyboard until something legible comes out. It doesn't really matter what, it's just that I kind of rely on the momentum...

Though I was originally going to review George R.R. Martin's A Dance with Dragons- Book One, of the Song of Ice and Fire series, I quickly realised that I could save time and effort by waiting until I'd read part two, whenever that might be. So, from fantastical fiction I switch to a more fascinating non-fiction, with the attention-grabbing title of War Reporting for Cowards, and it's snazzy orange cover.

I picked up the book many months ago, drawn in by the snazzy cover, the intriguing blurb, the gushing review quotes, and the desire to read something similar to Toby Young's How to Lose Friends and Alienate People. Basically; a piece of non-fiction by a British journalist out of his element, hopefully containing humour and poignancy. Ayres tale promised to fulfill that potential as he described how a fairly useless foreign correspondent for The Times (of London, you know) somehow managed to volunteer to become a war reporter, hanging around in the desert with a bunch of US marines in Iraq. With a plot like that it would take a pretty crappy writer to make it boring, and thankfully, Ayres is fairly good. Like Toby Young, he portrays himself as a foppish, cumbersome Hugh Grant type, perfectly unsuited to combat in the desert. A fairly likable chap, Ayres essentially acts as the reader's viewpoint; as a thoroughly pampered and and untested child of the first world, experiencing things with a sense of wonder and horror easily perceived. 

What makes War Reporting... a likable, easy to read book is Ayres' honest, open prose, where he doesn't really overstate anyone's personality or give anyone included a movie star aura. The marines who he spends so much time with are very likable people; respectful, well-trained, occasionally grumpy but never mean. Ayres doesn't go into the book with an agenda, and doesn't attempt to editorialize his experiences in an argument for or against the war on Iraq. It's presented as morally ambiguous throughout, including the end of Ayres time at war and his guilt mixed with relief. If anything, it's the natural sequence of events that kept this book from being really great for me.

The author's sudden departure from the country seems to cut everything short, and doesn't really give Ayres enough time to comprehend or appreciate his experiences. One of the key points of the book is the realisation of just how insane it is to be a war correspondent, traveling along the front line with an army, except without any weapons, and the author's unexpected reluctance and guilt at leaving hints at a developing story that doesn't have the time to get going; but then, at the same time, remains more believable because of it. Ultimately I'd recommend War Reporting for Cowards to all but the most staunch anti-war people; as a compelling narrative of the surreal nature of war. It won't blow your mind, but it will lodge itself in there somewhere for a good long while.

Haruki Murakami- Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche

Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche

Vintage

 Haruki Murakami
1998 (Japanese)/ 2000 (English)
Translated by Jay Rubin

Other Murakami Reviews- A Wild Sheep Chase - Dance Dance Dance - Underground - Sputnik Sweetheart - after the quake - After Dark - Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman - What I Talk About When I Talk About Running - 1Q84- Books I & II - Book III - Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage - Strange Library

“I feel very strongly that all Japanese at that time had the idea drilled into them of 1999 being the end of the world. Aum renunciates have already accepted, inside themselves, the end of the world, because when they become a renunciate, they discard themselves totally, thereby abandoning the world. In other words, Aum is a collection of people who have accepted the end. People who continue to hold out hope for the near future still have an attachment to the world."

Okay, I'm not exactly a consistent blogger. These these gaps are unavoidable, I'm afraid; I'm such a willing slave to pop culture that my attention drifts between film, music, comics, games, and, of course, books with such gleeful abandon that sometimes I'll float away from one medium for a little while. Recently the mostly-unloved distraction of computer games jumped back into my life with the acquisition of a Nintendo DS and Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, which consumed my life for a little while. Since I finished it's been sheer willpower that's held me back from slotting in the sequel cartridge and merrily continuing the saga, and so I'm going to do my best in that time to try and catch up on my book reviewing. So let's talk about that.

Old pal of mine Haruki Murakami's Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche is perhaps the most curious and unique of all his bibliography. While the celebrated author captured my literary heart through his collection of brilliant works of fiction, Underground is, alongside What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, one of his only forays in to non-fiction. The autobiographical nature of that book and its peaceful and often lighthearted nature made it very easy to swallow and enjoy (although it lacked Murakami's usual powerful narrative), but Underground has a far more difficult premise to gravitate towards, at least for me, anyway. It's perhaps best described and categorized as an example of investigative journalism, and was originally published in two installments; although every Western example I've seen has it collected entirely in one piece.

Underground studies the Tokyo subway system terror incident, where religious cult (slash political party) Aum Shinrokyo sent a number of agents to release deadly sarin gas on five different subway trains on March 20th, 1995. Despite the potency of the gas and the planned co-ordination of these acts of domestic terrorism, 'only' thirteen people were killed, but another fifty were severely injured, and literally thousands of others experienced temporary health problems, most of these with their eyesight. The first portion of the book, is about the people who found themselves unwittingly experiencing probably the most harrowing and dangerous experience of their lives, many of whom continued to suffer mentally and physically ever since.

Other critics more professional than I attribute this impassioned attempt by the author to portray the true extent of the tragedy to Murakami's own return to Japan; having lived in the United States for some time, the author wished to reconnect with his grieving homeland. In this book he does this by compiling a detailed look at many varying perspectives of the incident through interviews with victims and unassuming heroes of the day; each giving detailed accounts put into form by Murakami to comprise a fuller picture. The different voices and experience provide the reader with a clear view, offering pictures of bravery, tragedy, and every other human emotion when experienced amongst chaos and danger.

For this reader, such presentation came with both positives and negatives as a reading experience. The problem I faced was simple; despite Murakami's talents and despite his efforts to interview a wide variety of personalities, there were only so many times I could read about variations upon the same theme and settings without losing interest. To be honest this is probably true of most non-Japanese readers, and perhaps a somewhat inevitable problem with such a specific genre of book.

As a result, I took my time (and thus my blog stayed silent), and it was a while before I finished the first portion (the longer portion, I must add). When I started part two, however, the change in tone hooked me and I flew through the rest of the book with renewed vigour. Part two of the book is subtitled The Place That Was Promised, and was originally published a year after the first. It continues the interview format with one crucial difference; while the first section only spoke with victims of the subway sarin incident, the second only talks to members of the perpetrating group; Aum Shimrokyo. To be honest, after reading the testimonies of the victims became somewhat of a repetitive slog, learning more about Aum, it's origins, philosophies and inner-workings was far more interesting. Needless to say, they seem to be a pretty crazy group of people, combining elements of religion and politics under the command of a single leader, awaiting armageddon. When interviewing these people, Murakami is far more inquisitive and challenging, making things even more interesting.

For me, Underground really was a challenge through the middle segments. While I'm familiar with Murakami's portrayal of Japan in his fiction, there's still a massive culture gap in reality, and as such it's difficult to truey invest in the accounts. Murakami's intentions of encapsulating the horror of suburban terrorism upon daily lives only intrigued for a certain length of time. The second part of the book was a lot better to me; partly because the depiction here of Aum strikes me as the definite inspiration for the plot of Murakami's magnum opus (well, in my opinion) 1Q84, but mostly because insane death cults are a lot more interesting than normal people. Ultimately though, Underground won't stay with me as a book by one of my favourite authors, but as an interesting curio; an experimental non-fiction that left me with a lot to think about.

Charles Bukowski- Notes of a Dirty Old Man

Notes of a Dirty Old Man

Virgin

 Charles Bukowski

1969

Other Bukowski Reviews; Post Office - Factotum - Women - Ham on Rye - Tales of Ordinary Madness - Notes of a Dirty Old Man

"no pain means the end of feeling; each of our joys is a bargain with the devil

***

the difference between Art and Life is that Art is more bearable."

After exposing myself to the drug that is Bukowski for the first time with the seminal Post Office, I knew I'd probably love everything he'd ever written. Naturally it took me about a year to start reading more, but by god I've done it, and here's a hastily written review to prove it. I've got three other Bukowski novels in the cabinet now, so I can safely predict that I'll finish reading the complete Bukowski in about forty-two years.

As has been shown here, I'm a fan of reading various collected editions of shorter works by a favourite author, like Orwell, Thompson and Sir Terry, for example, and there's something about the unrelenting power and pace of Bukowski's prose that I felt would make Notes of a Dirty Old Man a memorable read at the very least. One of a few Bukowski compilations, this edition compiles fifty-seven editions of his column published in L.A.'s' short-lived tabloid Open City, published from '67 to '69. Each of the short articles is at least as surreal as the previous one, and I can only imagine and dream of reading it in the original weekly installments. Reading them consecutively as they're published here is almost an overwhelming experience.

As he is widely known for, Bukowski uses his page space to tell kaleidoscopic visions of his real life experiences, with snarling, aggressive narration. Many of the stories are almost completely obscene, and vary in their narrative coherency. On a few separate occasions Bukowski proclaims his disdain for the work of some of his contemporaries, particularly William Burroughs, though it was quickly apparent to me that much of Bukowski's presentation resembles the style of Naked Lunch, in their bizarre odysseys of semi-recognisable beatnik culture mired in surreal expressions of obscenity.

Bukowski is at heart a poet, and much of my enjoyment of this book comes from the power and rhythm of each of his sentences, where sanity is sacrificed for art. As such I read this book in small portions, finding it works better to savour a briefer taste of the strangeness. It was still over quickly though, as I find Bukowski strangely comfortable to read despite the aggression and downbeat exultation of twisted hedonism.

I think I've come over a bit wordy today, I might need a lie down. 

Toby Young- How to Lose Friends and Alienate People

How to Lose Friends and Alienate People

Toby Young
2001

'What were you nominated for?' I asked, struggling to make myself heard over the din. 'Best Supporting Dress?'
She gave me a blank look.
'I wasn't nominated for anything.'
'I know. That's just my way of saying you look great.'
'I'm sorry, what?'
She turned her head so her left ear was next to my mouth.
'YOU LOOK GREAT IN THAT DRESS.'
'Thanks', she said, recoiling. 'Will you excuse me? I've just seen someone I know.'

When I picked up this book it was literally just a case of judging a book by its cover; that and the hoard of reviewers quotes. Seriously, while most paperbacks have a smattering of flattering (I did a rhyme) comments from respected reviewing publications tastefully presented upon them, Toby Young's now infamous How to Lose Friends and Alienate People lathers the front cover, back cover and the first three pages in of praise for itself. My edition, by my count, has thirty-seven different reviewer quotes, including an obligatory joke one that doesn't make sense until you've read the book. This number of review quotes is clearly ridiculously preposterous, to the extent that it kind of made up my wavering mind to buy it (which I suppose means it totally worked, except I bought it second-hand so the publishers got nothing anyway); that, and a fun premise.

Toby Young is an English journalist of higher-class breeding, and plenty of credentials in various English publications to his name. This book isn't really about that, nor his youth, family, or life in England in general. Instead, Young's memoirs focus on a very particular time in his life, just after the new millennium as he gained a job in New York writing for Vanity Fair magazine. Although you might already know this because apparently there was a feature film starring Simon Pegg that was released in 2008 and I completely missed. I still haven't seen it because it looks terrible. But anyway, Young makes it very clear early on that this is the story of a plucky (if cheeky) young Brit looking to stretch his wings and take Manhattan. He also makes it clear early on in the book that his attempts are destined to abject failure. By taking the narrative direction in doing this the book becomes a kind of lighthearted (but not always so) self-analysis of a fairly normal, likable, but flawed individual who represents a whole culture of others, but who throughout remains the proverbial fish out of water.

As a Vanity Fair writer Young spent most of his time trying to cope with the overwhelming intensity of the celebrity culture he was by definition attached to. From the beginning he doesn't fit in whatsoever. He irritates colleagues, businessmen and celebrities with unintentional aplomb, in a mixture of some very funny scenes and some very strange ones. A constant theme of the book is his ultimate failure to grasp the unwritten rules of social etiquette he encounters, and as the book progresses he philosphises more and more upon the meaning of these things, analysing his view of the US as a whole in comparison to that of the UK. In doing so he comes of as somewhat of an Anglophile; not in a negative way as such,. but with the ultimate conclusion that his second country lacks the maturity of his parent one. As a Brit myself I did find this a little patronising anyway. In spite of all his efforts, I couldn't buy Toby Young as the down-on-his-luck good guy I feel he wanted to portray himself as.

There's a fine line between endearing and annoying, and the biggest problem I had with the book (which, I might add, is very well written) was that underneath it all, his ego shines through. I admire his humour and his efforts to not appear to have a big head, but when you look at his story from beginning to end, it's obvious that he screwed himself over by being an inflexible idiot who didn't have anywhere near enough charm to get what he wanted. In certain places it felt like he was going for the tone of gonzo journalism, but Young's prose is too informal and friendly to match up to journalistic hipster icons like Hunter S. Thompson.

But it's a good book because it's so provocative. Whether you like Toby Young or not, he portrays himself with a feeling of honesty, unafraid to describe some of his biggest failings. His narration is very good, personal and funny, and it's only as he editorialises more that it becomes sharper. I can see why this book was such a hit with the presses at the time and I certainly recommend it to anyone who likes the sound of the premise, but I can't promise you'll finish it liking the author as a person, because he's a bit of a git.

Hunter S. Thompson- The Great Shark Hunt- Strange Tales from a Strange Time

The Great Shark Hunt- Strange Tales from a Strange Time

Picador Press

  Hunter S. Thompson

1979 (Collected)

“I've always considered writing the most hateful kind of work. I suspect it's a bit like fucking, which is only fun for amateurs. Old whores don't do much giggling.”

“In a nation run by swine, all pigs are upward-mobile and the rest of us are fucked until we can put our acts together: not necessarily to win, but mainly to keep from losing completely.” 

First of all, Hunter S. Thompson is probably the most quotable author I know, and settling on a quote for this review was really hard, so I went with two. Secondly, this is the fifth installment in my frantic (well, ish) attempt to catch up with the list of books I'd read and not reviewed, which puts me more than half way there. For a lazy writer like me, this is somewhat of an achievement.

Anyway, this brings me to my latest review and it's my second Hunter S. Thompson one, after Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72. If you can remember, or just clicked the link and trawled through my rambling nonsense, I wasn't as much of a fan of that book as I'd like to be, though I did gain a positive impression of it overall. Basically the deal with that one is that I frantically admire, adore and worship Thompson's ability to select his vocabulary and manipulate his prose like a true genius, like a modern-day-drug addled Thomas de Quincy (he who wrote the book of which I stole and adjusted the title of for this blog) or Joseph Conrad (Thompson's quest to track down Ricard Nixon reminded my of the hunt for Kurtz in Heart of Darkness)- I like him that much. It's just the topic matter that I don't care enough about; like when Paul Auster inserts an article about baseball in a novel I'm enjoying.

The Great Shark Hunt- Strange Tales from a Strange Time is somewhat like Campaign Trail '72 in that both are collections of Thompson articles and columns from a set period. The latter was a pre-planned series following one topic, but this collection is far more open, collecting the author's most notable work from the late fifties until the end of the seventies, for famous publications such as Rolling Stone, Playboy & The New York Times as well as some very early articles writing for the US air force.

The subjects of these angrily-written, expletive-ridden, extravagant prose filled articles are generally the things that Thompson was most interested in. This means lots of articles about politics, and about the world of politics. Nixon and Jimmy Carter are constant targets of aggressive analysis, as is the Watergate scandal of course. Altogether the politics encompasses around half of the book, which I had mixed feelings about. As in Campaign Trail, I learned a little and enjoyed a little more about the 70's US politics scene, but the aspects that I enjoyed (namely Thompson's ability to portray the world in the way he does) were swamped by a deluge of names of people and societies that I've never heard of before, and so the deep context alienated me as a reader somewhat.

Everything else, though was very entertaining and interesting. The first part of the book is short but intriguing, containing a selection of Thompson's air force work. The character within his writing is totally clear and identifiable, but it's the thought of Thompson writing for the establishment (and failing to meet their standards) which is interesting. Part two of the book is the politics stuff. Some of it is taken directly from Campaign Trail and included as extracts, which is basically just a way of ripping the buying reader off. The third part of the book was the one that appealed to me most, as it avoids politics and instead focuses on travel and culture; looking at the beat generation, at South America. The book concludes with a focus on Thompson's gonzo influence, and the Fear and Loathing name.

This book isn't going to appeal to many people who pluck it randomly from the shelf, and, ironically, it'll never be as recognised as the amazing Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, but it's definitely the place to go for newer fans of Thompson who've just finished Raoul Duke's story, and also for readers particularly into the post-beat movement. While there are plenty of great full novels from that period, these shorter snippets of encapsulated life offer a manic, ingenious, and unique view into a fascinating artistic world.

Hunter S. Thompson- Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72

Fear and Loathing on the Campagin Trail '72

Simon & Sschuster

Hunter S. Thompson

1973

"A week earlier I'd been locked into the idea that the Redskins would win easily — but when Nixon came out for them and George Allen began televising his prayer meetings I decided that any team with both God and Nixon on their side was fucked from the start."

In hindsight, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 was probably the wrong book for me to choose to read. Like many, many others, my first exposure to Hunter S. Thompson was through Terry Gilliam's strange film adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and not longer after that I read and massively enjoyed the source material. That book remains Hunter's most famous work, existing as the prime example of gonzo journalism in action and remaining up there with Thompson's spiritual predecessor William Burrough's Naked Lunch as one of the most popular examples of drug literature an excitable and easily-influenced student can buy. Curiously though, none of Thompson's other work has gotten anywhere near as close to infiltrating the shared consciousness of the wider reading public, and so in that respect Thompson stands out as somewhat of an enigma, yet to be fully explored. When I came across a copy of what's arguably the author's second most famous work (and one that relies on the title of the first to catch a browser's initial attention more than it does its own subject) I couldn't resist picking it up, despite a nagging feeling that the subject matter would alienate me rather quickly.

Initially serialised in the magazine that Hunter will be forever related to, Rolling Stone, this book is essentially a hard mix of Thompson's self-defined gonzo journalism and serious, legitimate political journalism, as the author dedicates himself to covering the race for the presidency between eternal rivals the democrats and republicans across the year of 1972. Now, straight away there was a conflict for me between the subject matter and the literary style that, had I not been so amused by Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, could have pushed me away from this book entirely. It's not that I'm completely against trying to read about politics (I even took a module on US government and politics during my late teenage years, albeit rather unsuccessfully), but reading about US politics including its transitory figures and minutia of forty years ago was something this reader was always going to struggle with. I was hoping for the pure gonzo to shine.

The result is somewhere in between; though Thompson begins his coverage with a level-headed approach, sticking to his established, entertaining style to portray the varied characters making the initial moves in the national election race. To me particularly, they were all characters, most of whom I'd never heard of before. Even Richard Nixon, political superstar was someone who I mostly looked at as the President of Earth as a head in a jar. As a result of my own uninformed perspective I lost a lot of the context and with it some of the humour. As Fear and Lo odyssey of Hunter S./Raoul Duke as a twisted, mythical adventure through the overworld, the writing style in this book presented to me a similar kind of effect; real political figures become literary caricatures under Thompson's gaze and collaborative illustrator Ralph Steadman's pen.

As the story continues further and further into the campaign, Thompson seems to become more and more exasperated by his attempts to somehow make sense of the bizarre world around him, and his grasp of coherency suffered in my eyes. It became harder and harder for me to track what was going on, and my interest in the book wained. As I said at the beginning, this was probably the wrong book for me to read, because it became near impossible for me to keep up with. Thompson focuses strongly not only on the campaign, but mainstream US media's coverage and presentation of it. This in itself is interesting, but again the line between fantasy and reality is further blurred as these mainstream presentations almost completely overwhelm any semblance of actual truth, and the whole thing becomes a kind of mutated public relations monster, controlled by nobody but prodded from all angles. Considering the cocktail of drugs Hunter was likely on at the time, it's somewhat of a surprise that he had the mental fortitude to finish the project.

Ultimately, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 will, to a certain extent, live and die with the reader based on his or her prior knowledge of the people and places involved, or at least their willingness to try and work it out. I lack the patience or professionalism to make such an effort, and as a result found this book a mish-mash of satirical adventures that kind of exhausted me on the subject. Thompson's writing is as good here as it is anywhere else, and I don't want to try and downplay any of his efforts, as he delivered a historically relevant journal of an important time in the only way he could, but its intensity just didn't capture me.